The Climb

On a recent Sunday morning, Elisha Almonte, a sixteen-year-old honors student at the High School for Teaching and the Professions, in the Bronx, waited with her father, Beethoven Almonte, at his apartment, for a car to pick her up and take her to Manhattan. Elisha, who is pretty and slight, wore a skirt, a gray sweater, and polka-dot tights. “Tomorrow, I’ll be more glammed up,” she said. She was about to take an Amtrak train with Ruth Lande Shuman, the president of Publicolor, an art-based education organization, to Washington, D.C., to accept a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from Michelle Obama, at the White House. Beethoven Almonte said that he had never been to the White House but that he had gone to Bill Clinton’s Inauguration with his junior-high-school marching band.

Almonte first encountered Publicolor, which teaches students how to beautify their schools with paint, at the Bronx Writing Academy, her middle school. “They came to my school and showed before and after pictures,” she said. “I was, like, ‘I want to paint!’ ” She and her fellow-students painted the school’s common spaces Sundance, Oriole, and Apple Green. “We’re like semi-professional painters,” she said. The students get painting lessons (color theory, taping, rolling), and non-painting lessons (showing up on time, having a good attitude, S.A.T. prep). Later, they paint elsewhere: playgrounds, shelters, police stations.

Almonte paints every Saturday; she also writes and sings. At the Bronx Writing Academy, she said, “it wasn’t just a name—we wrote all the time. I like freewriting, whatever comes to mind. Song lyrics. I’m always writing music.” She laughed. “I’ve sung in talent shows. Never one of my songs, because I’m too nervous for everybody to hear that. At my eighth-grade graduation, I sang ‘The Climb.’ ” That’s a Miley Cyrus song, from the Hannah Montana era.

“Basically, the song’s saying it’s not about how we get there—it’s about the climb,” she said. Almonte’s father did not go to college; her mother went for two years. “Then I came along,” Almonte said.

With her Publicolor mentors, Almonte has visited Rutgers, Georgetown, and other universities. “I want to be a lawyer,” she said. “I want people to be treated fairly. I always love defending people, and in arguments and stuff I’m going to win.”

In midtown, Ruth Lande Shuman hugged Almonte and Irma Nepomuceno, a young Publicolor employee, who was travelling with them. “I feel like the mother chicken!” said Shuman, who is seventy. She is an industrial designer, and she founded Publicolor eighteen years ago. She wheeled a bright-orange suitcase and wore sunglasses, a dark coat, and a resin bangle bracelet the size of a Bundt cake.

In D.C., the threesome took a brisk walk through the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. They admired Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X,” a Lichtenstein, and a Calder. At the sight of a pyramid of white cubes, Shuman cried out with glee. “This, my darlings, is by Sol LeWitt, whose design we’re going to paint!” she said. (An upcoming project at a Manhattan high school.) They posed for a picture in front of it.

The next morning, the three assembled in their hotel lobby with the other award recipients. Shuman checked her e-mail. “One of my childhood friends says, ‘Celebrate with wild abandon!’ ” she said. Almonte, glammed up, wore flats and a cobalt-blue dress. She and Nepomuceno practiced shaking hands.

“It’s such an honor to meet you,” Almonte said.

At the White House, inside the East Wing, members of the President’s Marine Band, in scarlet jackets, played low-key jazz beneath a portrait of Bill Clinton. In the grand East Room—gold curtains, crystal chandeliers—the awardees took their seats, in front of enormous oil paintings of George and Martha Washington.

Ceremonial music played, and Michelle Obama arrived: colorful dress, bare arms, a spirit of maternal warmth. “Well, welcome to the White House!” she said. She praised the after-school groups for teaching kids how to play the blues, produce Shakespeare, and make go-karts, and “what it’s like to have a j-o-b.” Pairs of students and mentors marched up to her, smiling, to get their awards. Handshake practice hadn’t been necessary: Obama hugged them all. When Almonte took the stage, with Shuman, she beamed at the First Lady. Obama enclosed her in her arms, and they whispered to each other while posing for photographs.

As the ceremony concluded, a band from Mississippi—possibly the youngest blues musicians on earth—played “Sweet Home Chicago.” “One and one is two! Two and two is four!” an eight-year-old sang. They got a standing ovation. George Washington, above the crowd, extended a benevolent arm. The First Lady high-fived the band and told everybody to have fun at the reception, in the next room. “Enjoy yourselves! Don’t tear anything up,” she said.

What had Almonte whispered with the First Lady? “I told her I’d never forget this,” Almonte said. “She said that she’d never forget it, either. And she told me to go to college.” ♦

Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyor­ker.com.